FPGAs Are the Hero In-Network Computing Needs

In-network computing has gained some traction recently with the advent of programmable switches in the datacenter, however, for widespread adoption as a general computing paradigm, more flexible deployment platforms are required. We argue that FPGAs, suitably virtualized, can serve such a role, covering the continuum from edge to cloud, addressing the key barrier of hardware deployability and flexibility for in-network computing. FPGAs offer orders of magnitude more efficient execution than general purpose CPUs and low overhead packet ingestion—and with the right hardware virtualization techniques, they can also be flexible. We propose to bring these capabilities together in a Stream-Oriented Hardware Offload paradigm supported on lightweight host-less FPGA platforms to enable In-Network Acceleration of present and emerging distributed applications.